Ebates is an online platform that offers its services as an affiliate to many retail stores giving you discounts or cash back after shopping at the retail stores linked at Ebates.com in return.

HOW IT WORKS.
Actually the process is not that much complicated. A customer just visits the website(ebates.com) and search for a particular store they want to do shopping at followed by clicking the ‘shop now’ button and do the shopping. Once the purchase is made a certain percentage of that purchase displays in the customer’s account. Lets take as an example, if Ebates offers a 15% cash back or discount for shopping at a liquor store and you buy drinks worth $100, the you automatically get $15 as cash back.

FINANCING.
Ebates gets its capital mainly by the affiliate marketing: this business model is where companies or online stores in this case pays a commission for introducing or referring sales. Ebates.com is a affiliate of over 2,000 stores and this acts as quite a large market in which someone visits link at Ebates to the linked retail store and Ebates gets a commission. Ebates in return gives you half of their earned commission via cash back. This makes it a a win-win situation since the company gets its sales, Ebates gets half the commission and you get the other half of the commission.

INCREASE EARNINGS ON EBATES.
1. Disable ad blockers on your website since Ebates does not work well with the ad blockers enabled.
2. Visit the website regularly to check out for coupons before checking out.
3. Try as much as possible to complete a purchase within 24 hours after clicking on a link at Ebates.
4.There is an offline cash back feature at Ebates where you can link your credit card to your Ebates account. Once this is done, you can search for a store, click on the ‘link offer’ button and once the offer is tied to the card, the cash back reflects directly to you account.

PROS.
1. Ebates is free to use and shop.
2. Fast access to a variety of online retail stores.
3. Acts as source of income via cash back by referring customers to Ebates.
4. Retail stores get a large pool to showcase their products and services.
5. Gives you a variety of choices to chose from by comparing products and services from several stores.

CONS.
1. Apple withdrew its support on cash back at Ebates.
2. It has got issues tracking orders sometimes.
3. If you do not shop online then Ebates is not a good choice for you.

Smart gadgets are changing the world. The comforts of home are becoming more advanced than they have ever been in the past. Gadgets in our homes control temperature, save energy, provide security, and can answer nearly every question that can be imagined. Possibilities for our society are endless as the advancement of technology is not only permeating work environments, but home environments just the same. A person can now store information within the very walls of their home without having to write or type a word. What types of smart gadgets are worth investing in and which ones are a fleeting trend? That is the question that seems to be asked the most as people spend more and more money on these technologies.

The home robot, seems to be one of the most highly sought out items of this year, and the past few. Also known as a “personal assistant” or “smart speaker”, the premise is that a person can have the device do nearly any task by simply asking it from inside his/her home. Tasks like scheduling appointments and receiving reminders are popular for organizing one’s life, while other tasks like playing music or searching for a good “night out” spot can be done just as easily with the same device.

Other smart gadgets like home security cameras are also becoming more popular. These devices are more advanced this year than in years past and are now easily linked with a smart phone so that a person can seemingly “be home”, even when they are truly not. An owner of one of these devices can do anything from answer the doorbell remotely to record events within their home to view later. These gadgets also come in incredibly small sizes and can easily be camouflaged. Home security has never been quite as good as it is today.

Other smart gadgets are made not only to make life more convenient, but also to conserve energy and be environmentally friendly. Gadgets on the market can enable us to turn off lights and adjust temperature at home from another location. Wi-fi enabled plugs, smart sprinkler systems and smart gadgets that attach to shut off the water for us are all ways to save money and the environment that are now available on the market. Smart gadgets are not only making life easier, but are catapulting our society into a new age and way of living.

Have you ever wondered why the Google website has never gone down? I also doubt whether you can find a single day in the past ten years where the Google website has experienced downtime. The reason why Google has ensured such reliability despite the huge amounts of traffic that the site gets in a single day simply lies in the magic that is Cloud Hosting! Cloud Hosting is simply the use of several clustered servers for internet hosting services.

In Cloud Hosting each of the several servers performs a specific task and in case one or more servers fail, the other remaining servers will kick in and perform the dysfunctional server’s task temporarily. Cloud hosting is a very reliable alternative to the use of dedicated/shared servers because of:

1. On demand access to additional resources In cloud hosting you can get additional bandwidth very efficiently without having to deal with customer service to help you get assistance in increasing your allocation. You can easily increase the resources at your disposal immediately; this will help you avoid getting your site suspended when it experiences a sudden increase in traffic.

2. Scalability Almost all websites tend to have periods where the number of users tends to be at its highest. This might be only for a short period of time such as when a new product is being downloaded. During this period the resources available to the user tend to be strained. In cloud computing, such a user can increase the resources available albeit temporarily. After the number of users decreases the owner can return back to the previously allocated resources quite easily.

With cloud hosting the need for a dedicated server is eliminated as was the case earlier when your needs overwhelmed your shared hosting environment. Cloud hosting could assist in such instances as most of the time the resources provided for a dedicated server might be too much and tend to be misused. Cloud Hosting is relatively new and tends to be slightly more expensive as opposed to shared/dedicated servers and few web hosts offer this service but with all its advantages it might turn out to be worth the extra dollars.

All of us are aware of the term Web hosting but for the information of those who are new to the Internet, web hosting is a service where a company provides servers and support for a website. A typical web hosting service may cost you from $4 to $200. The price of the web hosting is determined by the type of web hosting plan you choose. Generally limited plans (limited bandwidth, limited disk space, limited RAM) are less costly compared to unlimited plans.

Virtual Private server hosting: It is a new concept in web hosting and has the features of both shared and dedicated server hosting. It is neither too cheap as shared hosting nor too expensive as dedicated hosting. So what is this VPS hosting exactly? VPS hosting utilizes the concept of virtualization of the web servers. This concept is similar to time-sharing and multiprogramming. In a VPS system, your site has its own RAM and disk space but has to share the CPU with other sites.

So your website’s performance is dependent entirely on your CPU share which varies from company to company. But what we need to observe here is that a VPS system does not have only an extra RAM and disk space but it also has an extra feature called the ‘burstable ‘RAM. This burstable RAM is basically an extra unutilized pool of RAM reserved to handle the ‘Digg-effect’ (the condition when a website suddenly receives an enormous amount of traffic). Advantages of VPS hosting: By now we have realized that a VPS web hosting is a middle ground for all web hosting purposes. It offers fairly good speed, flexibility, reliability, and resources.

You can get a good VPS hosting plan for $20 per month. Hostwinds.com is providing a very good quality VPS hosting at a competitive price of $ 17.5 per month. Unlike other hosting providers this company doesn’t oversell its VPS nodes. This U.S.-based company is very dedicated towards customer satisfaction. They offer live chat, phone support and a special emergency support. Emergency support is a new feature where customer executives are constantly working to tackle unforeseen emergency situations.